Easy Marks 0
At NYmag, Jonathan Chait explains how decades of conspiratorial thinking and anti-intellectualism have made right-wingers ripe for the plucking. A snippet:
These predictions are not just scare tactics. They reflect the authentic ideology of the American right, which treats liberalism as either indistinguishable from, or an unstoppably slippery slope toward, Bolshevistic central planning. But these beliefs are also very effective as scare tactics. Conservative fears that Democrats will usher in total societal collapse are good ways to scare conservatives into buying gold (an especially lucrative Obama-era conservative grift) or guns.
The right hardly has a monopoly on fearful predictions, of course. But their impact is magnified by the conservative distrust of the intellectual elite. Conservatives have spent decades training their supporters to reject the authority of bureaucrats, professors, the media, or any institution not explicitly committed to the right-wing agenda.
Do please read the rest; it sheds much light on dis coarse discourse.
Via Delaware Liberal.